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There is nothing innocent about me, or what happened to me. I make no apologies for my choices or the results.
I was divorced for the third time in my life in 2003. I am not proud of that. Sad is the best way to describe it. Three times divorced is not a record any man should strive to achieve.
My first marriage was a fool's errand. I was 18 and she was 17 and pregnant. She - we - got pregnant in July. We were married in October, the nineteenth to be exact, and our son was born in May. By the time he was eight months old, she was gone and so was my son. What happened? Hell, I'd be lying if I told you that my memories were accurate. I have told the story so many times that I no longer know what is true and what's invention. All I can be sure of is that she ran away with a drummer from a rock band. After all these years, I still remember his name. I will keep his last name from these pages – but his first name was Kenny. Within the year of her leaving me, we were divorced. That was in Vermont. I was twenty when I got the final divorce judgment. All I can say is that over the years, my assessment that she was clinically nuts seems to have been borne out.
It would be eleven years before I married again.
I had some short-term girlfriends in those long years, but for the most part I was alone. There were a few intense relationships, each lasting about a year. But, by and large, in the intervening periods between the marriages, there were years of true celibacy. I never learned to play the field or date casually. I was either playing with all my chips on the table or I was sitting it out completely. During those celibate years, I would wonder if my fate was to be married to my right hand for the rest of my life. The failed marriage had left me feeling that I was not desirable; that I was incapable of attracting a truly desirable woman. Most of my relationships were with damaged women who had little to give me, and no way to grow into a healthy relationship. Why were they damaged? The reasons varied, but the fact is that I sought them out. I figured that with them I had a chance of getting lucky for a day or two. I didn't give myself a chance with women who weren't damaged. I didn't try. Or ... you could say with some honesty, I didn't know how. In all honesty, maybe I still don't.
My second marriage lasted exactly thirteen years. The divorce was granted by the court on our wedding anniversary. (The odds are 364:1 and, considering 365 random things probably happen each day, it's not as unlikely as you might think.) There were a few days of good marriage, followed by twelve years of hell. For the last few years we slept in separate rooms and lived separate lives. I finally swallowed my pride/shame and admitted defeat. I left the marriage because it was the only sane thing left to do. It was that or continuing to live with a woman who had a hard time distinguishing her funds from the funds of others. Her first embezzlement had cost me in the end about ninety thousand dollars. When I left the marriage she was playing fast and loose with federal funds and I wanted no part of it. The judge didn't believe me and pounded me in the divorce decree.
Five years later, I married again. I thought I had learned from my past disasters, but that was not the case. We were together a little over eight years before I left the marital residence and, seven months later, she filed for divorce. She was a good woman. Not nuts, not a thief, but damaged in other ways. Truth be told, was I not damaged? I was and am damaged by the events of my life. It is fair to say that the marriage just did not 'take.' We were both at fault. On my side, it was probably far too much scar tissue from my past experiences.
So there I was, overweight, with high blood pressure, and false teeth. I snored so loud that I bet you would have heard me if we had rooms next to each other in a hotel.
In many ways I was a good man but, for whatever reason, marriage and I did not work well. Was it my entire fault each time? As you can tell, I think not; however, after three failures, you have to question my ability to make good choices!
Could I get married again? Sure, I guess, if I married someone in whom I had no interest, but what's the point in that? The sad truth was that at this point in my life I was only emotionally responsive to slim, pretty women at least fifteen years my junior and, in truth, usually even younger. Considering all that I was, no one of such a group, who had her head on straight, was going to put me on her 'A' list.
Truthfully, I really didn't want to marry again.
For the entire time I was in my three marriages, I was not rich and sometimes I was pretty poor.
During the entire last marriage, I was in a lawsuit to recover income and ownership that was illegally taken from me over a year prior to the marriage. Even though we got along OK financially, there was this big payday always hanging out there.
It was still hanging out there when we got divorced.
I was fifty-seven. I had a house to live in. (I had never sold my house when I moved into my third wife's home. That should have set off alarms!) I was alone, just barely getting by financially, and sexually starved. As much as I would like to have gotten laid regularly and frequently, there were no options.
Hell, for the first seven months back in my house I slept on a couch. I went through so many variations on how to set up the couch as my bed that I gave them version numbers. By the time the mattress I purchased finally arrived, I was on Couch v4.2-5. It actually worked quite well.
Family? I had a son age 39 and a daughter aged 37. Both lived in a different state. Though I loved them both very much, they had and still have little to do with my life on a daily basis.
I lived in a truly rural part of the American West. The kids lived in NYC.
Once the reality of the third divorce sank into my skull, I knew that I did not want another wife. I did not want, would not be able to find, a mistress; but needed the ministrations of a prostitute on a regular basis. While my need for emotional intimacy would go unmet, my need for physical intimacy might be met. There were only two problems: I did not know any prostitutes; I did not have the money to pay for one, yet. But that might change.
I just hung out; not quite a hermit but without anything going on, either.
When the legal settlement finally came about, that was the state I had been in for a while.
The settlement did not leave me filthy rich as some got to be in the "dot com" boom of the nineties, but I was now financially secure. In addition, I was still working and drawing a salary. I could easily afford a prostitute. I figured I would allocate two thousand dollars a month for whatever that would get me. The rest I would invest. As I was in a rural area, I had no idea how much those dollars would purchase in services, assuming there were any services to purchase.
Finding a prostitute was not easy in a small town. As I continued my search for one, I had an unexpected visitor.
My mother, age 93 at the time, decided it was time to see her son. She flew 2000 miles and I picked her up at the Airport in Denver. Her time with me was, in some ways, a revelation.
She said, It's my fault – and your father's – that you have failed at the marriages. We never argued. We had a perfect marriage and you never learned how to deal with normal marriage issues. We were a bad role model.
Well, in truth, that is a bunch of bullshit. Bullshit, to the extent that it is her fault. She was right that they never seemed to argue, but that is because they both respected each other and because, as much as he chose not to exercise his authority, we all knew he had it. He had the final say, if one was needed. It just never seemed to be needed.
What came next wasn't bullshit, it was just plain crazy.
She said, Go find a girl. Look overseas. Find a girl who will give you children.
I looked at her. She was nuts. I probably said as much.
She insisted that I was not too old and that other men had done it. Finally, she said that if I went to meet a girl, she would help pay for the trip. She could afford it (as could I) but it was sort of a 'double-dog-dare-you' type of thing.
Before I put her back on a plane to go home, I was looking at Asian dating websites. I posted my profile on a couple of them. One of them was a loser and nothing came of it. The other came alive in a way I could not believe. I was inundated by offers from women who wanted to meet me.
So now, my less-than-intense interest in the possibility was refocused. This thing was becoming real and serious, but I had no idea about the process. Before I went an inch farther, it was time for homework.
I learned that there was a formal process for becoming engaged overseas and bringing the fiancée back to the USA for marriage, at which point the girl gets a provisional green card. It is not easy, it is bureaucratic, but that also means it is doable.
All along, I said, and I say here again, I really did not want another wife. I was having second thoughts about this, even as I started the process. I decided that, even if I did get married, I would make sure by all means, including legal, that I had no obligation to be monogamous.
Still, the USA's visa rules make it damned hard to bring a mistress into the country. In fact, the visa rules are incredibly restrictive. Whomever I brought in, I would have to marry.
My web/dating profile included my correct height, weight, age and an honest picture. I listed all my drawbacks and made it clear I was looking for a woman who would bear me children. By my calculations, that meant she had to be no older than 35, which would make her at least 22 years younger than I was.
I got a few invites from older women, but the flood was from women aged from 25 to 34. I got a serious one from an eighteen-year-old! Were they all pretty? No, but a surprising number were attractive to my eyes. I have in subsequent years come to the conclusion that Anglos assess beauty in Asian women differently than do Asian women assessing Asian women. But from my vantage point it was like walking into a candy store. There was a proviso. I had read many warnings about cons and that women weren't always what they appeared to be. This issue of doctored (photo-shopped) photos and doctored letters was irrelevant when dealing with women in the Philippines, since those women I dealt with could read/write and speak English and would engage with you over a webcam at an internet café. It would cost the Filipina ₱20 (Philippine Pesos), or what amounted to $0.40, for an hour at the café to chat with me.
Knowing what the women really looked like, sounded like, and such, was not an issue. If you didn't send them money, it was hard for them to scam you. Some did essentially demand money and those I turned away from with alacrity.
I made it clear to all the women I met this way that, when I headed over to the Philippines, that I was not there just to meet only them. I would meet a number of women before I made a choice. That, in retrospect, was a very smart move.
By the time I was ready to travel in August 2003, I was interested in three women. Each had a daughter. The women ranged in age from 25 through 32. I will call them Drama, Ganda and Joy.
Drama was 25 with a five-year-old. Not only the youngest, she was the smallest. At 4' 10" and 90 pounds, a US woman's petite XXS size dress fit her fine. I was to learn she was a fickle girl, full of passion, who was in ways a real drama queen. Being with her was fun, but staying with her would have been impossible. While it took a while to convince her it was over, I knew it was over for her before the end of our first day together. In truth, I had my doubts about her before ever leaving the States. We did spend four outrageously fun days together. She wore the clothing I bought for her. I insisted she not wear panties, which drove her crazy, but I did not care. She was cute as you please and I fucked her in every hole she had, but one, each day. But we were not to be together beyond those four days.
I will write about the other two in a bit. They were the ones I was really going to seriously consider. First, I will paint a picture of the Philippines as I saw it in the summer of 2003 and explain a few oddities of the country.
The plane rides to get there were endless. I had a two hour flight by jet-prop to the Denver airport. From there I took a flight to Los Angeles. In LA, you leave the domestic flights terminal and walked outside in the hot, humid Southland air to the international departure terminal. So far, I had been up since 3:30AM (MDT) to catch my 6:05am flight to Denver and now in LA as I stood on line at the Philippine Airlines departure counter it was 9:00PM (PDT). My plane would leave LA at 11:14PM that evening. We would have a refueling in Guam, no one would leave the plane, and then arrive in the Philippines at 6AM (Philippine Time). That translates to 4PM back home ... or the fact that I had left my bed some 37 hours earlier ... Do you think you can sleep on the plane? Ha! Bless the Filipinos. They fed me five times on that flight. You could catnap, but that was it.
The Republic of the Philippines is part of the Malaysian Archipelago. Filipinos are racially related to Thais and others in the region. There are two official languages in the country. Tagalog (also called Filipino) and English. Yes, English is an official language. There are 7,107 islands in the country, but not too many really large ones. The largest is Luzon, and that is where one will find Manila. Most people in Manila speak a form of Tagalog from childhood on, but not all, and on Luzon but outside of Manila, they often speak other languages. On most other islands they speak one of the other one hundred and seventy-five languages in their home. Since the schools teach in Tagalog and English, many Filipinos speak at least three languages by the time they graduate high school at age 16. In southern Mindanao where much of this journal concerns itself, the common languages are Visayan (also called Cebuano and Bisaya) and Ilonggo (technically called Hiligaynon, but none of the speakers call it that). Some residents of southern Mindanao will speak Visayan, Ilonggo, Tagalog, (other languages such as Maguindanao, Ilocano, and Maranao,) and English.
The weather in the Philippines is normally ranges from the 80's Fahrenheit into the 90's. It will make a guy from the States sweat, but it is not nearly as hot as Austin, TX or Phoenix, AZ during the summer. Most do not use air conditioning, which they call air-con, but all the malls are air conditioned. Taxis pretty much will be marked with Air-Con on their doors to assure you of a more comfortable ride.
When I got to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA1) Terminal #1, I was really tired. After I made my way to the front of the line, luckily, the Immigration and Customs folks at the airport just basically waved me through with a welcome to the Philippines.
I was careful to find a metered cab out front – I had been warned that this was necessary. Off I rode to the Best Western in the old part of Manila proper. Greater Manila is like Greater New York City to the extent that there are essentially many cities that are all lumped together and called Manila. Makati is the financial center. Quezon City has some of the more wealthy areas. Old Manila is the original city and it is no longer the true hub of either government or business. Still it is where the US embassy is found.
My first sights of Greater Manila left an impression that has stayed with me ever since and it was not far off the map. Think about a capitalist system without meaningful laws regarding commerce, no planning and a real entrepreneurial spirit. It looked like Manhattan on an acid trip. The traffic looked exactly the same. I will drive in the outer provinces in the Philippines but I will never drive in Greater Manila. And that is from a guy who has driven a tractor-trailer through both NYC and Chicago. Driving in Greater Manila is an elaborate game of chicken, although when you are in the middle of it, it more closely resembles bumper cars where no one exactly touches.
I got to the hotel at 7:15AM with a boost of adrenaline thanks to the drive. My room at the Best Western including my internet access was about $44US per day.
I had arranged for Ganda to meet me there at 9:30. I took a shower, changed my clothes and lay down for a nap. At 9:40 there was a knock on the door. Ganda had been escorted up by a bellhop. I tipped him and Ganda entered the room.
How can I explain this so that you will really appreciate what transpired? You know I was fat. By fat I do not mean grossly corpulent. But I did carry far too much weight. I was 58 at this moment in time. I had gray hair and a gray beard. Into the room walks this 28 year-old beauty in high heels and a dress that comes to mid-thigh. She is wearing minimal makeup and precious little else. Her face is really pretty and her smile is tinged with a trembling fear as the door closes behind her.
All I am able to say to her is, Wow, you are beautiful! She smiles. We sit on the edge of the bed and try to talk, but that is just not working. We are fumbling badly. I kiss her and she kisses back. We lie back on the bed, still kissing. Slowly the kissing becomes more intense and the clothes start to come off. By noon she is naked and I am in her bareback. She is as active as I, giving as well as taking. We take turns. I eat her pussy. It has no smell at all! The pussy is clean shaven; not a hint of hair. She goes down on me and does a good job, though she does not swallow. We fuck like rabbits in between rest breaks. (When using Viagra, which I did right before I lay down, and then a few times later, as the days continued, there is an interesting side effect. You can stay hard for a long time but it is hard to cum.) By 4PM, we decide we are hungry. We shower and go downstairs to the hotel restaurant for a meal.
Once done, we retire once more to the room and commence more lovemaking. She weighs 96 pounds and I am 220. She is a small, pretty Asian beauty and I am just a white guy with nothing special about me. What I am experiencing is out of this world. She denies me nothing. She allows me to take her ass as well as her pussy. Anything I want, it is OK with her. The next day, after we finally get out of bed at 10AM following a morning of more fucking and sucking, we go shopping for a few things at a Mall and then return to more sex. Under her dresses, she wears a thong and a small padded bra, and that is all. Fucking her means only lifting up the hem of her dress. When we are out she hangs onto me like to lose touch would mean her death. She sticks to me and simply refuses to let go.
In the first three days we have not learned much about each other, other than I am not going to hurt her and she doesn't want to lose me. But, the first three days are all we have at that time and she knows it. She knows I am about to meet someone else.
One thing I have discovered is that she doesn't have a home, or an apartment, or even a rented room. She has what is known in the Philippines as a bed-spacer. Like much in that portion of population in the archipelago, a huge section of the society manages in an ad hoc fashion. A bed-spacer is a room that has been converted by a homeowner into a dormitory for either women or men. The room may be small. It contains three, four or more beds and there is somewhere in the place a communal, but essentially single use, bathroom. So renting a bed-spacer is renting a bed in that room and having access to a toilet and cold shower. There is also no hot water. That is usual: Except for where foreigners stay, no one has hot water.
In fact, if you ask a Filipino about it they tend to laugh or giggle at you. If you, as a foreigner, lease a place and want a hot shower, there is (as I discovered) an option. It is possible to purchase a hot water device for your shower. It connects to the wall in the shower were the spigot normally is found. The water enters the tank and exits via a flexible hose and showerhead. It is an on-demand system. The heater uses electricity. It has a cord that runs from the tank to an outlet. (Normally, the outlet is just to the side of the tank on the wall above where the shower curtain hangs. It works fine, but never in a million years, would it get UL approval in the US!)
Ganda is working at a call center. Not one that takes calls from disgruntled US citizens calling an 800 number. No, in this case, she is selling BlackBerry phones with long-term contracts to small UK businesses. It is done by cold calls. Since the UK is 8 hours different from the Philippines, their day starts at 2pm and runs until midnight or later.
I knew Ganda had a daughter, but clearly she is not staying at a bed-spacer. I gather that the child is in the care of the extended family on the Island of Mindanao.
The night before I am to leave, I ask her if she will agree to be with me if I add other women to our life. She is less than happy. She wants to know what she is doing wrong. I told her she isn't doing anything wrong, which is why I am asking. She is truly confused, but fundamentally unhappy about that and it remains unresolved when I leave the next day for Boracay and my next girl.
To see the next girl and the one after her, I will be on different islands in the Philippines. I am not sure I want to see Ganda again before I leave. She knows we have enjoyed each other, but there certainly is nothing settled. Her hesitancy about other women in my bed makes her a less likely candidate.